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apert Brooke 

and the 

Intellectual 
Imagination 



Walter de la Mare 



i 



^■^.. 



RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 

A LECTURE 

BY 

WALTER DE LA MARE 




NEW YORK 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1920 






COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
HAKCOURT., BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 



0A1I \ 5 1920 



THE QUINN a BODEN COMPANY 
RAHWAY N. J 



©CLA559385 



RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 



The following paper zvas read before the School 

at Rugby on the evening of 2Sth March 19 19. 

A few alterations and omissions have been made 

in preparing it for the press 



RUPERT BROOKE AND THE 
INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION 

One evening in 1766, Dr. Johnson being then in 
the fifty-seventh year of his age, his friends, Boswell 
and Goldsmith, called on him at his lodgings in 
Fleet Street. They thereupon endeavoured in vain 
to persuade him to sup with them at the Mitre. 
But though he was adamant to their cajoleries, he 
was by no means averse to a talk. With true hospi- 
tality, since he had himself, we are told, become a 
water-drinker, he called for a bottle of port. This 
his guests proceeded to discuss. While they sipped, 
the three of them conversed on no less beguiling a 
subject than that of play-going and poetry. 

Goldsmith ventured to refer to the deplorable 
fact that his old friend and former schoolfellow 
had given up the writing of verses. '' Why, sir," 
replied Johnson, '' our tastes greatly alter. The 
lad does not care for the child's rattle. ... As 
we advance in the journey of life, we drop some of 
the things which have pleased us; whether it be 
that we are fatigued and don't choose to carry so 

3 



Rupert Brooke and the 



many things any farther, or that we find other things 
which we Hke better." 

Boswell persisted. ^' But, sir," said he, '' why 
don't you give us something in some other way? " 
'' No, sir," Johnson replied, '' I am not obliged to 
do any more. No man is obliged to do as much as 
he can do. A man is to have part of his life to 
himself." " But I wonder, sir," Boswell continued, 
" you have not more pleasure in writing than in not 
writing." Whereupon descended the crushing re- 
tort, '^ Sir, you may wonder." 

Johnson then proceeded to discuss the actual 
making of verses. '' The great difficulty," he ob- 
served — alas, how truly, " is to know when you have 
made gdod ones." Once, he boasted, he had written 
as many as a full hundred lines a day; but he was 
then under forty, and had been inspired by no less 
fertile a theme than " The Vanity of Human 
Wishes," a poem that, with other prudent counsel, 
bids the " young enthusiast " pause ere he choose 
literature and learning as a spiral staircase to 
fame: — 

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes 
And pause a while for Letters, to be wise . . . 

None the less, Johnson made haste to assure 



Intellectual Imagination 



Goldsmith that his Muse even at this late day was 
not wholly mum:— "I am not quite idle; I made 
one line t'other day; but I made no more." '' Let 
us hear it," cried Goldsmith, '' we'll put a bad one 
to it! " '' No, sir, I have forgot it." And so sally 
succeeded sally. 

How much of the virtue of Johnson's talk we 
are to attribute to Boswell's genius for selection 
and condensation, and how much to the habitu- 
ality of his idol's supreme judgment, penetration, 
humanity and good sense, is one of the delectable 
problems of literature. This fact, at any rate, is 
unquestionable; namely, that Johnson seldom indeed 
let fall a remark, even though merely in passing, 
which is not worth a sensible man's consideration. 
He knew — rare felicity — what he was talking about. 
He spoke — rare presence of mind — not without, but 
after, aforethought. However dogmatic, overbear- 
ing and partisan he might be, not only in what 
he is recorded to have said is there always something 
substantive, four-square, but very frequently even 
his most occasional utterance stands like a signpost 
at the crossroads positively imploring the traveller 
to make further exploration. 

"The lad does not care for the child's rattle." 
Here, surely, is one of those signposts, one more 



Rupert Brooke and the 



pressing invitation to explore. By rattle, obviously, 
Johnson meant not only things childish, but things 
childlike. For such things the '^ lad " does not 
merely cease to care. He substitutes for them other 
things which he likes better. Not that every vestige 
of charm and sentiment necessarily deserts the 
rattle, but other delights intrude; and, what is still 
more important, other faculties that will take pleas- 
ure in these new toys and interests come into energy 
and play. Does not this rightly imply that between 
childhood and boyhood is fixed a great gulf, phys- 
ical, spiritual, psychological, and that in minds in 
which the powers and tendencies conspicuous in 
boyhood, and more or less dormant or latent in 
earlier years, predominate, those of childhood are 
apt to fade and fall away? 

This is true, I think, of us all, whatever our 
gifts and graces; but in a certain direction I believe 
it is true in a peculiar degree of poets — of children 
and lads (and possibly lasses, though they, for- 
tunately for me, lie outside my immediate inquiry) 
who are destined, or doomed, to become poets. 
Poets, that is, may be divided, for illustration and 
convenience, into two distinct classes: those who in 
their idiosyncrasies resemble children and bring to 
ripeness the faculties peculiar to childhood; and 



Intellectual Imagination 



those who resemble lads. On the one hand is the 
poet who carries with him through life, in varying 
vigour and variety, the salient characteristics of 
childhood (though modified, of course, by subse- 
quent activities and experience). On the other, the 
poet who carries with him the salient characteristics 
of boyhood (though modified by the experiences and 
activities of his childhood). This is little more than 
a theory, but it may be worth a passing scrutiny. 

What are the salient characteristics of childhood? 
Children, it will be agreed, live in a world peculiarly 
their own, so much so that it is doubtful if the adult 
can do more than very fleetingly reoccupy that far- 
away consciousness. There is, however, no doubt 
that the world of the grown-up is to children an in- 
exhaustible astonishment and despair. They brood 
on us. And perhaps it is well that we are not invited 
to their pow-wows, until, at any rate, the hatchet 
for the hundredth time is re-buried. Children are 
in a sense butterflies, though they toil with an almost 
inconceivable assiduity after life's scanty pollen and 
nectar, and though, by a curious inversion of the 
processes of nature, they may become the half- 
comatose and purblind crysalides which too many of 
us poor mature creatures so ruefully resemble. 
They are not bound in by their groping senses. 



8 Rupert Brooke and the 

Facts to them are the liveliest of chameleons. Be- 
tween their dream and their reality looms no im- 
passable abyss. There is no solitude more secluded 
than a child's, no absorption more complete, no 
insight more exquisite and, one might even add, 
more comprehensive. As we strive to look back and 
to live our past again, can we recall any joy, fear, 
hope or disappointment so extreme as those of our 
childhood, any love more impulsive and unquestion- 
ing, and, alas, any boredom so unmitigated and un- 
utterable? 

We call their faith, even in ourselves, credulity; 
and are grown perhaps so accustomed to life's 
mysteries that we pale at their candour. ^' I am 
afraid you cannot understand it, dear," exclaimed 
a long-suffering mother, at the end of her resources. 
" O yes, I can very well," was her little boy's reply, 
" if only you would not explain." " Why is there 
such a lot of things in the world if no one knows all 
these things? " ran another small mind's inquiry. 
And yet another: ^'Perhaps the world is a fancy, 
mother. Shall I wake from this dream? " 

We speak indulgently of childish make-believe, 
childish fancy. Bret Harte was nearer the truth 
when he maintained that '' the dominant expression 
of a child is gravity." The cold fact is that few 



Intellectual Imagination 



of us have the energy to be serious at their pitch. 
There runs a jingle: 

O, whither go all the nights and days? 

And where can to-morrow be? 
Is anyone there, when I'm not there? 

And why am I always Me? 

With such metaphysical riddles as these — riddles 
which no philosopher has yet answered to anybody's 
but his own entire satisfaction — children entertain 
the waking moments of their inward reverie. They 
are contemplatives, solitaries, fakirs, who sink again 
and again out of the noise and fever of existence 
into a waking vision. We can approach them only 
by way of intuition and remembrance, only by be- 
coming even as one of them; though there are many 
books — Sully's '' Studies of Childhood," for in- 
stance, Mr. Gosse's " Father and Son," John Rus- 
kin's '' Prseterita," Serge Aksakoff's '' Years of 
Childhood," Henry James's '' A Small Boy and 
Others " — which will be a really vivid and quiet 
help in times of difficulty. 

This broken dream, then, this profound self- 
communion, this innocent peace and wonder make 
up the secret existence of a really childlike child: 
while the intellect is only stirring. 



lo Rupert Brooke and the 

Then, suddenly Hfe flings open the door of the 
nursery. The child becomes a boy. I do not mean 
that the transformation is as instantaneous as that, 
though, if I may venture to give a personal tes- 
timony, I have seen two children venture out into 
the morning for the first time to their first boys'- 
school, and return at evening transmogrified, so to 
speak, into that queer, wild, and (frequently) ami- 
able animal known as a boy. Gradually the childish 
self retires like a shocked snail into its shell. Like 
a hermit crab it accumulates defensive and aggres- 
sive disguises. Consciousness from being chiefly 
subjective becomes largely objective. The steam- 
engine routs Faerie. Actuality breaks in upon 
dream. School rounds off the glistening angles. 
The individual is swamped awhile by the collective. 
Yet the child-mind, the child-imagination persists, 
and if powerful, never perishes. 

But herCy as it seems to me, is the dividing line. 
It is here that the boyish type of mind and imagina- 
tion, the intellectual analytical type begins to show 
itself, and to flourish. The boy — I merely refer, if 
I may be forgiven, to Boy, and far more tentatively 
to Girl, in the abstract, though, of course, there is 
no such being — the boy is happy in company. Com- 
pany sharpens his wits, awakens his rivalry, deep- 



Intellectual Imagination ii 

ens his responsiveness, enlarges his responsibility, 
" stirs him up," as we say. Apron-strings, however 
dear their contents, were always a little restrictive. 
He borrows a pitiless pair of scissors. He, unlike 
the child told of by Blake and Vaughan and Tra- 
herne, had always more or less '' understood this 
place." He loves '' a forward motion " — the faster 
the better. When " shades of the prison-house " 
begin to close about him, he immediately sets out to 
explore the jail. His natural impulse is to discover 
the thronging, complicated, busy world, to sail out 
into the West, rather than to dream of a remote 
Orient. He is a restless, curious, untiring inquirer, 
though preferably on his own lines rather than on 
those dictated to him. He wants to test, to examine, 
to experiment. 

We must beware of theories and pigeon-holes. 
Theory is a bad master, and there is a secret exit 
to every convenient pigeon-hole. There are children 
desperately matter-of-fact; there are boys dreamily 
matter-of-fancy. But roughly, these are the two 
phases of man's early life. Surroundings and educa- 
tion may mould and modify, but the inward bent 
of each one of us is persistent. Can we not, indeed, 
divide "grown-ups" into two distinct categories; 
those in whom the child is most evident, and those 



12 Rupert Brooke and the 

resembling the boy? '' Men are but children of a 
larger growth/' says Dryden. And Praed makes 
fun of the sad fact: '' Bearded men to-day appear 
just Eton boys grown heavy." The change is one 
of size rather than one of quality. Indeed, in its 
fight for a place, in its fair play and foul, in its rigid 
conventions, in its contest for prizes that are so 
oddly apt to lose their value as soon as they are 
won, how like the school of life is to any other 
school; how strangely opinions differ regarding its 
rules, its aims, its method, its routine and — its Head- 
master. 

And the poets? They, too, attend both schools. 
But what are the faculties and qualities of mind 
which produce poetry, or which incline us towards 
it? According to Byron, there are four elements 
that we are justified in demanding of a poet. He 
found them, not without satisfaction, more con- 
spicuous in Pope than in his contemporaries. These 
elements sense, learning (in moderation), passion 
and invention. Perhaps because he was less rich 
in it, he omitted a fifth element, by no means the 
least essential. I mean imagination, the imagina- 
tion that not merely invents, but that creates, and 
pierces to the inmost spirit and being of life, human- 
ity and nature. This poetical imagination also is 



Intellectual Imagination 13 

of two distinct kinds or types: the one divines, the 
other discovers. The one is intuitive, inductive; 
the other logical, deductive. The one visionary, 
the other intellectual. The one knows that beauty 
is truth, the other proves that truth is beauty. And 
the poet inherits, as it seems to me, the one kind 
from the child in him, the other from the boy in 
him. Not that any one poet's imagination is purely 
and solely of either type. The greatest poets — 
Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, for instance, are mas- 
ters of both. There is a borderland in which dwell 
Wordsworth, Keats and many others. But the 
visionaries, the mystics, Plato, Plotinus, the writer 
of the book of Job, Blake, Patmore, and in our own 
day. Flecker, and Mr. John Freeman, may be taken 
as representative of the one type; Lucretius, Donne, 
Dryden, Pope, Byron, Browning, Meredith, and in 
our own day, Mr. Abercrombie, may be taken as 
representative of the other. 

The visionaries, those whose eyes are fixed on the 
distance, on the beginning and end, rather than on 
the incident and excitement of life's journey have 
to learn to substantiate their imaginings, to base 
their fantastic palaces on terra firma, to weave their 
dreams into the fabric of actuality. But the source 
and origin of their poetry is in the world within. 



14 Rupert Brooke and the 

The intellectual imagination, on the other hand, 
flourishes on knowledge and experience. It must 
first explore before it can analyse, devour before it 
can digest, the world in which it finds itself. It 
feeds and feeds upon ideas, but because it is crea- 
tive, it expresses them in the terms of humanity, 
of the senses and the emotions, makes life of them, 
that is. There is less mystery, less magic in its 
poetry. It does not demand of its reader so pro- 
found or so complete a surrender. But if any 
youthfulness is left in us, we can share its courage, 
enthusiasm and energy, its zest and enterprise, its 
penetrating thought, its wit, fervour, passion, and 
we should not find it impossible to sympathise with 
its wild revulsions of faith and feeling, its creative 
scepticism. 

Without imagination of the one kind or the other 
mortal existence is indeed a dreary and prosaic busi- 
ness. The moment we begin to live — when we meet 
the friend of friends, or fall in love, or think of our 
children, or make up our minds, or set to the work 
we burn to do, or make something, or vow a vow, or 
pause suddenly face to face with beauty — at that 
moment the imagination in us kindles, begins to 
flame. Then we actually talk in rhythm. What is 
genius but the possession of this supreme inward 



Intellectual Imagination 15 

energy, in a rare and intense degree? Illumined by 
the imagination, our life — whatever its defeats and 
despairs — is a never-ending, unforeseen strangeness 
and adventure and mystery. This is the fountain 
of our faith and of our hope. 

And so, by what I am afraid has been a tediously 
circuitous route, I have come at length to Rupert 
Brooke and to his poetry. His surely was the in- 
tellectual imagination possessed in a rare degree. 
Nothing in his work is more conspicuous than its 
preoccupation with actual experience, its adventur- 
ousness, its daring, its keen curiosity and interest 
in ideas, its life-giving youthfulness. Nothing in his 
work is more conspicuous by its absence than 
reverie, a deep still broodingness. The children in 
his poems are few. They are all seen objectively, 
from without; though a wistful childlike longing 
for peace and home and mother dwells in such a 
poem as '' Retrospect '^ or " A Memory.'' I am not 
sure that the word '' dream " occurs in them at all.^ 



1 To my shame and consternation my friend Mr. Edward 
Marsh has pointed out to me, since this paper was read, that 
the word " dream " occurs in no less than fifteen of Brooke's 
poems. This, I hope, will be one more salutary lesson that 
general impressions are none the worse for being put to a 
close test. Still, the fact that that peculiar, dreamlike quality 
and atmosphere which is so conspicuous in the poetry of the 
visionaries is very rarely, if ever, present in that of Brooke 
will not, I think, be gainsaid. 



i6 Rupert Brooke and the 

" Don't give away one of the first poets in Eng- 
land," he says in one of his letters, " but there is in 
him still a very, very small portion that's just a 
little childish." Surely it was the boy in him that 
boasted in that jolly, easy fashion, the boy in him 
that was a little shamefaced to confess to that faint 
vestige of childishness. The theme of his poetry is 
the life of the mind, the senses, the feelings, life 
here and now, however impatient he may be with 
life's limitations. Its longing is for a state of con- 
sciousness wherein this kind of life shall be possible 
without exhaustion, disillusionment, or reaction. 
\His words, too, are not symbols; they mean precisely 
what they say and only what they say. Whereas 
the words of the mystics of the childlike imagina- 
tion, Blake and Vaughan and Coleridge, seem chiefly 
to mean what is left hinted at, rather than expressed. 
His world stands out sharp and distinct, like the 
towers and pinnacles of a city under the light of the 
sky. Their world, old as Eden and remote as the 
stars, lies like the fabric of a vision, bathed in an 
unearthly atmosphere. He desired, loved, and 
praised things in themselves for their energy, vivid- 
ness and naturalness; they for some inward and 
spiritual significance, for the reality of which they 
are the painted veil. They live in the quietude of 



Intellectual Imagination 17 

their imaginations, in a far-away listening, and are 
most happy when at peace, if not passive. He is all 
activity, apprehensiveness. 

Nothing pleases him so much as doing things, 
though, fretted that body and mind so soon weary, 
he may pine for sleep. His writing, whether in his 
poems, his Webster, or in his letters, is itself a kind 
of action; and he delights far more than the mystics 
in things touched, smelt and tasted. He delights, 
that is, in the things in themselves, not merely 
for their beauty or for the reality they represent. 
He is restless, enquiring, veers in the wind like a 
golden weathercock. He is impatient of a vague 
ideahsm, as wary as a fox of the faintest sniff of 
sentimentality. To avoid them (not always quite 
successfully,) he flies to the opposite extreme, and 
to escape from what he calls the rosy mists of poets' 
experience emphasises the unpleasant side of life. 
His one desire is to tell each salient moment's truth 
about it. Truth at all costs: let beauty take care 
of itself. So he came to write and to defend poems 
that in Mr. Marsh's witty phrase one finds it dis- 
quieting to read at meals. A child, a visionary, lives 
in eternity; a man in time, a boy — sheer youthful- 
ness — in the moment. It is the moments that flower 
for Brooke. What is his poem " Dining-room Tea " 



1 8 Rupert Brooke and the 

but the lovely cage of an instant when in ecstasy 
time and the world stood still? 

For truth's sake he has no fear of contradictions. 
t^ The mood changes, the problem, even the certainty 
shows itself under different aspects; he will be faith- 
ful to each in turn. Obviously he rather enjoyed 
shocking the stagnant and satisfied, and bating the 
thin-blooded philosophers, enjoyed indeed shocking 
and bating himself, but he also delighted, as in a 
pure intellectual exercise, in looking, as we say, all 
round a thing. If, unlike Methuselah, he did not 
live long enough to see life whole, he at least con- 
fronted it with a remarkably steady and disconcert- 
ing stare. If he was anywhere at ease, it was in 
" the little nowhere of the brain." Again and again, 
for instance, he speculates on the life that follows 
death. First, (mere chronological order is not ab- 
solutely material) he imagines the Heaven of the 
fish: 

Fat caterpillars drift around, 
And Paradisal grubs are found; 
Unfading moths, immortal flies, 
And the worm that never dies. 
And in that Heaven of all their wish, 
There shall be no more land, say fish. 

Next, he laments despairingly in Tahiti, with a 



Intellectual Imagination 19 



kind of wistful mockery, at the thought of an im- 
mortality where all is typical and nothing real: 

And you'll no longer swing and sway 
Divinely down the scented shade, 
Where feet to Ambulation fade, 
And moons are lost in endless Day. 
How shall we wind these wreaths of ours, 
Where there are neither heads nor flowers? . . . 

Next, he momentarily wafts himself into the being 
of a Shade: 

So a poor ghost, beside his misty streams. 
Is haunted by strange doubts, evasive dreams. 

Hints of a pre-Lethean life, of men, 
Stars, rocks, and flesh, things unintelligible, 

And light on waving grass, he knows not when; 
And feet that ran, but where, he cannot tell. 

Next, he deprecates the possibility of a future life 
even as tenuous and nebulous as this: 

Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile. 
Cling, and are borne into the night apart. 
The laugh dies with the lips, '' Love " with the lover. 

And, again, he is lost in rapture at the possibility 
which he mocked at in the first poem, sighed at in 



20 Rupert Brooke and the 

the second, belittled in the third, and denied in the 
fourth: 



Not dead, not undesirous yet, 
Still sentient, still unsatisfied, 

We'll ride the air, and shine, and flit. 
Around the places where we died, 

And dance as dust before the sun. 
And light of foot, and unconfined, 

Hurry from road to road, and run 
About the errands of the wind. 

And every mote, on earth or air. 

Will speed and gleam^, down later days. 

And like a secret pilgrim fare 
By eager and invisible ways. 

Nor ever rest, nor ever lie. 

Till, beyond thinkin-^, out of view. 

One mote of all the dust that's I 

Shall meet one atom that was you. 

Then in some garden hushed from wind, 
"Warm in a sunset's afterglow, 

The lovers in the flowers will find 
A sweet and strange unquiet grow 

Upon the peace; and, past desiring, 

So high a beauty in the air, 
And such a light, and such a quiring, 

And such a radiant ecstasy there, 



Intellectual Imagination 21 

They'll know not if it's fire, or dew, 
Or out of earth, or in the height, 

Singing, or flame, or scent, or hue. 
Or two that pass, in light to light, 

Out of the garden, higher, higher. . . . 

Which of these conflicting solutions, we may in- 
quire, to one of Life's obscurest problems are we 
to accept as his? Do, or do not, such seductive 
speculations as these confirm the view expressed by 
Plato in the Republic that the poets undermine the 
rational principle in the soul? It may be admitted 
that such poetry as this, in the words of Bacon, 
" makes men witty," and is unquestionably a 
'^ criticism of life "; but can it be said to teach — as 
Wordsworth intended that his poetry should? Well, 
when Mrs. Barbauld had the temerity to charge 
" The Rime of the Ancient Mariner " with two grave 
faults; first, that it was improbable, and next, that 
it had no moral, Coleridge cheerfully pleaded guilty 
to the first charge, while, as for the other, " I told 
her that ... it had too much — that is, for a work 
of pure imagination." Will it satisfy " serious " 
inquirers if it be suggested that these poems of 
Brooke's are manifestations of the intellectual im- 
agination? Probably not. They demand of a poet 
a definite and explicit philosophy. They desire of 



22 Rupert Brooke and the 

him a confirmation, if not of their own faith, then 
of his. But it cannot be too clearly recognised that 
the faith of a poet is expressed in all that he writes. 
He cannot, either as a man or as a poet, live without 
faith; and never does. A few lovely words about 
lovely things is an expression of faith: so, too, is all 
love, all desire for truth, all happiness. If we have 
such faith ourselves, if we search close enough, we 
shall find a poet's faith expressed implicitly through- 
out his work. 

We must, too, be thankful for many and various 
mercies, the mercy, for instance (so richly conferred 
in Brooke's writing), that here was a man who never 
spared mind and spirit in the effort to do the best 
work he could, who was that finest thing any man 
can be — a true craftsman delighting in his job. We 
cannot demand that he shall answer each of our 
riddles in turn; ^^ tidy things up." He shares our 
doubts and problems; exults in them, and at the 
same time proves that life in spite of all its duplicity 
and deceits, and horrors, is full of strangeness, 
wonder, mystery, grace and power: is ''good." 
This, at any rate, is true of Rupert Brooke. And 
he knew well enough that the nearer a poet gets to 
preaching, the more cautious he should be respect- 
ing the pulpit and the appurtenances thereof. 



Intellectual Imagination 23 

As with the life hereafter, so with this life, so 
with love. The sentimentalist always shy of the 
real, the cynic always hostile to it, cling to some 
pleasing dream or ugly nightmare of the real, know- 
ing them to be illusions. That is precisely what 
Brooke, keen, insistent, analytical, refused to do. 
He pours out his mind and heart for instance in the 
service of love. The instant that love is dead, he 
has, to put it crudely, very little use for its corpse. 
He refuses point blank to find happiness in any 
happy medium, to be a wanderer, as he said, in " the 
middle mist.'^ There are two sides — many more 
than two, as a matter of fact — to every question. 
" Blue Evening " or '' The Voice " prove his com- 
petence to see both. At times, indeed, with a kind 
of boyish waywardness and obstinacy he prefers 
the other side — the ugliest — of the much-flattered 
moon. Helen's young face was beautiful. True. 
In age not only must she have lost her youthful 
fairness, but possibly became repulsive. Well, 
then, as a poet, hating " sugared lies," he must 
say so. 

It is indeed characteristic of the intellectual im- 
agination to insist on " life's little ironies." It 
destroys in order to rebuild. Every scientist who 
is not a mere accumulator of parts, possesses it. 



24 Rupert Brooke and the 

Acutely sensitive to the imperfections of the present, 
its hope is in the future; whereas the visionary, 
certainly no less conscious of flaw and evil is happy 
in his faith in the past, or rather of the eternal now. 
The one cries " What shall I do? " the other " What 
must I be? " The one, as has been said, would 
prove that truth is beauty; the other knows that 
beauty is truth. After all, to gain the whole world 
is in one true sense to save the soul. 

In the lugubrious and exciting moment when 
Brooke wrote '^ Kindliness " and " Menelaus and 
Helen," it was not his aim or thought to see that 
age, no less than youth and beauty is, in his own 
phrase, " pitiful with morality." He resented ugli- 
ness and decay, and associated them with death and 
evil. For death, whatever else it may be, brings 
destruction of the beauty of the body; and evil 
brings the destruction of the spirit which is the life 
and light of the body. They are the contraries of 
a true living energy; and because his mind seemed to 
be indestructible, and his body as quick with vital- 
ity as a racehorse, and love the very lantern of 
beauty, he not only feared the activities of death, 
but was intolerant of mere tranquillity, even of 
friendliness, and, above all, of masking make-believe. 

SometiCiCS, indeed, in his poetry, in his letters, 
he is not quite just to himself in the past, or even 



Intellectual Imagination 25 

in the present, because he seemed to detect com- 
promise and pretence. " So the poor love of fool 
and blind I've proved you. For, fool or lovely, 'twas 
a fool that loved you." On the other hand, listen 
to these fragments from the letters in Mr. Marsh's 
vivifying memoir, '' I find myself smiling a dim, 
gentle, poetic, paternal Jehovah-like smile — over the 
ultimate excellence of humanity." "Dear! dear! 
it's very trying being so exalted one day, and ever 
so desperate the next — this self-knowledge! . . ." 
" I know what things are good: friendship and work 
and conversation. These I shall have. . . . " He 
tells how the day has brought back to him " that 
tearing hunger to do and do and do things. I want 
to walk 1000 miles, and write 1000 plays, and sing 
1000 poems, and drink 1000 pots of beer, and kiss 
1000 girls, and — oh, a million things! . . . The 
spring makes me almost ill with excitement. I go 
round corners on the roads shivering and nearly cry- 
ing with suspense, as one did as a child, fearing some 
playmate in waiting to jump out and frighten 
one. ..." " Henceforward," writes Mr. Marsh 
in another passage, '' the only thing he cared for — 
or rather he felt he ought to care for — in a man, was 
the possession of goodness; its absence the one thing 
he hated. ... It was the spirit, the passion that 
counted with him " 



26 Rupert Brooke and the 

His verse tells the same tale. Life to poetry, 
poetry to life — that is one of the few virtuous 
circles. Life and thought to him were an endless 
adventure. His mind, as he says, was restless as. a 
scrap of paper in the wind. His moods ebbed and 
flowed, even while his heart, that busy heart, as 
he called it, was deeply at rest. Wit to such a mind 
is a kind of safety-valve, or even the little whistle 
which the small boy pipes up for courage' sake in 
the dark. Letters and poems flash and tingle with 
wit — and rare indeed are the poems in our language 
which, like '' Tiare Tahiti," ''The Funeral of 
Youth," and " The Old Vicarage," are witty and 
lovely at the same time: 

And in that garden, black and white, 
Creep whispers through the grass all night; 
And spectral dance, before the dawn, 
A hundred Vicars down the lawn; 
Curates, long dust, will come and go 
On lissom, clerical, printless toe; 
And oft between the boughs is seen 
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . . 
Till, at a shiver in the skies. 
Vanishing with Satanic cries, 
The prim ecclesiastic rout 
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out. 
Grey heavens, the first bird's drowsy calls, 
The falling house that never falls . . . 



Intellectual Imagination 27 

Few poets have mocked and made fun and made 
beauty like that, all in one breath, and certainly not 
the childlike visionaries, though one of them knew 
that even by mere playing the innocent may go to 
heaven. And beneath Brooke's wit was humour — 
the humour that is cousin to the imagination, smiling 
at the world it loves and understands. 

Byron, too, was witty, mocking, enjoyed turning 
things inside out and wrong side upwards, picking 
ideas to pieces, shocking the timid, the transcen- 
dental, the spinners of cocoons; but Brooke, unlike 
Byron, was never sourly sardonic, never morbidly 
cynical. Simply because he was alv/ays testing, 
analysing, examining, with an intellect bordering 
as close on his emotions as his emotions bordered 
on his intellect, he was, again, in Mr. Marsh's words, 
self-conscious, self-examining, self-critical, but never 
self-absorbed; never an ice-cold egotist, that is, 
however insistent he may be on his own individual- 
ity. More closely than Byron he resembles 
Mercutio : 

If love be rough with you, be rough with love; 
Prick love for loving, and you beat love down . . . 
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the mire 
Of this, sir-reverence love, wherein thou stick'st 
Up to the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho! . . . 



28 Rupert Brooke and the 

I mean, sir, in delay 
We waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day. 
Take our good meaning, for our judgment sits 
Five times in that ere once in our five wits. 

And in his metaphysical turns, his waywardness, 
his contradictoriness, his quick revulsions of feeling, 
he reminds us not less — he reminded even himself 
(in a moment of exultation) of the younger Donne. 

Though " magic " in the accepted sense is all but 

absent from his verse — the magic that transports the 

imagination clean into another reality, that drenches 

a word, a phrase, with the light that was never 

strangely cast even on the Spice Islands or Cathay, 

he has that other poetic magic that can in a line 

or two present a portrait, a philosophy, and fill the 

instant with a changeless grace and truth. That 

magic shines out in such fragments, for instance, 

as: 

Beauty was there, 
Pale in her black; Dry-eyed; she stood alone . . . 



or 



or 



And turn, and toss your brown delightful head. 
Amusedly, among the ancient Dead; 



And less-than-echoes of remembered tears 
Hush all the loud confusion of the heart; 



Intellectual Imagination 29 



or 



There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter 
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after, 

Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance 
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white 

Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance, 
A width, a shining peace, under the night. 

What, again, is it but this magic which stills the 
heart, gives light to the imagination, in one of the 
less well-known, but not the least quiet and tender 
of his poems, ^' Doubts "? 

When she sleeps, her soul, I know. 
Goes a wanderer on the air, 
Wings where I may never go. 
Leaves her lying, still and fair, 
Waiting, empty, laid aside. 
Like a dress upon a chair . . . 
This I know, and yet I know 
Doubts that will not be denied. 

For if the soul be not in place. 
What has laid trouble in her face? 
And, sits there nothing ware and wise 
Behind the curtain of her eyes, 
What is it, in the self's eclipse. 
Shadows, soft and passingly. 
About the corners of her lips. 
The smile that is essential she? 



30 Rupert Brooke and the 

And if the spirit be not there, 
Why is fragrance in the hair? 

Above all, Brooke's poems are charged with, and 
surrender the magic of what we call personality. 
1 They seem, as we read them, to bring us into a 
happy, instant relationship with him, not only 
ghostly eye to eye, but mind to mind. They tell 
more than even friendship could discover unaided. 
They share his secrets with the world — as if a boy 
had turned out the contents of his astonishing 
pockets just before going to bed. They share them, 
too, in that queer paradoxical fashion which makes 
a volume of poems a more secure refuge even than 
one's lawyer, one's doctor, or a priest. 

Many of our fellow-creatures — whether we like 
or dislike them, approve or disapprove — always re- 
main a little mysterious and problematical. Even 
when they most frankly express themselves, we are 
conscious that there is still something in them that 
eludes us, a dream unshared, a reticence unbroken, 
a fugitive phantom. Have we, indeed, all of us, to 
the last dim corner and attic, cellar and corridor, 
explored ourselves? Because of his very candour, 
because, so to speak, of what he looked like, this 
was to some extent true of Rupert Brooke. Age, in 
time, scrawls our very selves upon our faces. Fast- 



Intellectual Imagination 31 



locked the door of our souls may be, but the key 
hangs in the porch. But youth and delightful man- 
ners may be a mask concealing gravity and deep 
feeling. And what is one's remembrance of that 
serenely eager, questing face, stilled, as it were, with 
the phantom of a smile that might have lingered in 
the countenance of the Sphinx in her younger days, 
but that of the very embodiment of youth? We 
don't often meet people in this world who instantly 
recall the Golden Age and remind us that the Greek 
sculptors went to Life for their models. Even 
Henry James, in his essay on Brooke, not less in 
its translucency than five fathoms deep, seems to 
pause Prospero-like before that Ariel whom he had 
suddenly encountered in the beautiful setting of the 
Cambridge backs. With the lingering gusto which 
an epicure lavishes on a rare old vintage he tastes 
—tastes again, and all but hesitates for words 
to express his precise reaction; and to suggest that 
Henry James was ever at a loss for words is to 
insinuate that the Mississippi might run short of 
water. 

One was just happy in Brooke's company. Guilt- 
ily one eyed his gold. Here in laughing, talking 
actuality was a living witness of what humanity 
might arrive at when— well, when we tread the 



32 Rupert Brooke and the 

streets of Utopia. Happiness is catching. No doubt 
this admiration sometimes elated him, without his 
being aware of it. At times, in certain company, it 
must have been a positive vexation. Admiration is 
a dense medium through which to press to what 
treasure may be beyond. Poets, indeed, unHke chil- 
dren, and for their own sake if not for that of others, 
should be heard and not seen; and it must have 
been very difficult for this poet to take cover, to 
lie low. He came; you saw; he conquered. And 
after? Like a good child's birthday cake, he was 
as rich as he looked. 

" I never met," wrote to his mother one heaven- 
sent friend (I mean sent to the outskirts of heaven), 
" I never met so entirely likeable a chap. . . . 
Your son was not merely a genius; what is perhaps 
more important, he had a charm that was literally 
like sunshine." Indeed the good things simply softly 
shimmered out of him — wit, enthusiasm, ideas, rail- 
lery, fun, and that sympathetic imagination concern- 
ing everybody and everything that he himself said 
was the artist's one duty. He had, of course, his 
own terms — critical, and perhaps at times a little 
exacting. If he suffered a fool, no more than with 
the rest of his own generation was it with a guileless 
gladness. He preferred humanity to be not too stiff, 



Intellectual Imap-ination 33 



not too stupid, and not to dry. Talk he loved; and 
when he listened, his mind was in his eyes, '' tree 
whispering to tree without wind, quietly." If he 
hated, if his sensitiveness wholly recoiled, then that 
was the end of the matter. 

He confronted his fellow-creatures just like the 
boy he was, ready to face what and who may come 
without flinching; smiling lip and steady eye. One 
was conscious of occasional shynesses and silences, 
even a little awkwardness at times that was in itself 
a grace. One was still more conscious of an in- 
satiable interest and speculation. His quiet gaze 
took you in; yours couldn't so easily take him in. 
These are but my own remembrances, few, alas, 
however vivid and unfading: and even at that they 
are merely those of one of the less responsive sex! 

In spite of life's little disillusionments (which, it 
is prudent to remember, we may cause as well as 
endure; ) in spite of passing moods of blackness and 
revulsion, nothing could be clearer in his poems, in 
his letters, and in himself, than his zest and hap- 
piness. Looking back on his school-life he said that 
he had been happier than he could find words to say. 
Vv^hat wonder that at twenty he describes himself 
as in the depths of despondency ''because of my 
age " ? And a little later: " I am just too old for 



34 Rupert Brooke and the 



life so full and so arresting that he was afraid he 
might not be able to keep pace with it? It was a 
needless apprehension. The sea was deep beneath 
the waves and the foam. If he had lived to be, let 
us say, forty, he would have said just the same 
thing, though, perhaps, with more emphasis and 
more philosophy. He was never to experience that 
little misfortune. He flung himself into the world 
— of men or of books, of thought and affairs — as a 
wasp pounces into a cakeshop, Hotspur into the 
fighting. When his soul flourished on Walter Pater 
and Aubrey Beardsley, he thought it a waste of time 
to walk and swim. When, together v/ith meat and 
alcohol, he gave up these rather rarified dainties, 
and lived, as it is fabulously reported, on milk and 
honey, it seemed a waste of time to do anything else. 
He could not be half-hearted. Indeed, in that " tear- 
ing hunger to do things " — working, playing, read- 
ing, writing, publishing, travelling, talking, social- 
ism, politics — any one thing seemed a waste of time, 
because meanwhile the rest of life's feast was kept 
waiting. "What an incredibly lovely, superb 
world! " he exclaims. Lovely, superb — what are 
the adjectives which we should choose? Again, " it 
is fun going and making thousands of acquaint- 



Intellectual Imagination 35 

ances." It must be fun — when you are Rupert 
Brooke. Frankly, voraciously, that is how he met 
everything and everybody — from Mrs. Grundy to 
the Statue of Liberty. 

The Statue of Liberty reminds me, naturally 
enough, of America. Three years ago, the fact that 
one of the great American Universities had awarded 
Brooke the first Rowland Memorial Prize — " in 
recognition of an achievement of marked distinction 
in the field of literature " — passed, comparatively 
speaking, unnoticed in England. But that award 
was not merely an academic compliment. The value 
of a gift is in the spirit of the giver, and this gift 
of love and admiration was from the heart. The 
friend — because none worthier to be sent was 
free — the friend of Brooke's whose privilege it was 
to go to New Haven formally to receive that prize 
on/,Mrs. Brooke's behalf, was absolutely unknown 
there. His name — my name, as a matter of fact — 
was, alas! no Sesame. In New York I went, I 
remember, to call one day on a very charming friend 
of Brooke's, to whom he wrote some of his gayest 
letters. A graceful coloured lift-girl inquired who 
the caller was. I told her. Whereupon she ex- 
claimed, with a smile all radiant gold and ivory, 
'' Gee whiz! what a name! " This trifling and im- 



36 Rupert Brooke and the 

modest digression is only to show just how Mrs. 
Brooke's ambassador stood in the great eye of 
America. Now, in Brooke's own words, '' American 
hospitahty means that with the nice ones you can be 
at once on happy and intimate terms." I wish I had 
words to express how true that is — that heedful, 
self-sacrificing, unbounded kindness. The nice ones 
indeed were everywhere, for without exception they 
all knew, or knew of, Brooke. Not that they knew 
no other contemporary English poet, perhaps even 
a little better than John Bull does himself — Mr. 
Yeats, Mr. Binzon, Mr. Masefield, Mr. Gibson. But 
I had but to whisper " R. B." — and the warmest 
welcome and interest were mine. Now, in nineteen 
hundred and sixteen that welcome for his sake was 
not merely of literary significance. The ardour and 
devotion of those English sonnets of his had gone 
home, and the home of poetry is world-wide. Never 
was a true friendship between two countries and 
nations of such vital importance as that between 
England and America to-day. Long before the 
American nation actually ^' came into " the war, 
many, many hearts there beat truly with ours. 
Cousins cannot invariably see eye to eye. But we 
cannot forget that generous sympathy in the hour 
when England needed it. Our steady insight and 



Intellectual Imagination 37 

understanding, with as slight an admixture as pos- 
sible of a peculiar quality of insularity which may 
be comprehensively described as '' God-Almighti- 
ness," is the least we can give in return. 

I hope it will be no breach of confidence if I quote 
a few words from a letter I received from a friend 
in America only the other day, one who knew 
Brooke's poetry not by hearsay, but by heart. " I 
dutifully belong," she writes, '' to the English-speak- 
ing Unions, and am properly interested in various 
schemes for making the relations between England 
and America closer. But I may say this to you — I 
don't want the alliance to result in the least Ameri- 
canizing of England. I want England to remain 
^ like her mother who died yesterday ' " (she is quot- 
ing Edward Thomas, rare poet and rarest friend). 
" We over here," she continues, '' can't have all the 
simple, lovely and solitary things of which English- 
men write. It helps so much to be able to think of 
them as they are in England." These are the words 
of a devotee of England — such devotees as poetry 
makes and keeps. 

But such were the friends that Brooke himself 
with his poetry and happiness made wherever he 
went. " Happy," indeed, is the refrain that runs 
through all his letters. And then, at length, when on 



38 Rupert Brooke and the 

his way to the last great adventure of all: "I have 
never," he writes, " I have never been so pervasively 
happy in my life." That is how he opened the door 
into one's life, and came in. But behind all that we 
say or do, behind even what we think, is the solitude 
wherein dwells what we are: and to that solitude 
he was no stranger. This solitude was not what 
called most frequently for expression. Because each 
day was so great a tax, however welcome, on mind 
and body, he sometimes longed for sleep: 

O haven without wave or tide! 
Silence, in which all songs have died! 
Holy book, where hearts are still! 
And home at length under the hill! 
O mother quiet, breasts of peace, 
Where love itself would faint and cease! 

infinite deep I never knew, 

1 would come back, come back to you. 
Find you as a pool unstirred, 
Kneel down by you, and never a word, 
Lay my head, and nothing said, 

In your hands, ungarlanded; 

And a long watch you would keep; 

And I should sleep, and I should sleep! 

So, again and again his thoughts in his poetry turn 
towards death, only to appearance the deepest sleep 
of all. But then, again, because nothing in life 



Intellectual Imagination 39 

could satisfy such a hunger and aspiration for life, 
beyond mood and change he longed for a peace 
''where sense is with knowing one": and, beyond 
even this bodiless communion, for the peace that 
passes understanding: 

" Lost into God, as lights in Hght, we fly. 
Grown one with will." 

Simply because things as they are are not as they 
should be, we take refuge at times from the defeats 
and despairs of this mortal existence in satire and 
scepticism, a passing doubt in man, in goodness, in 
the heavenly power. So, too, did he. He kept piling 
up the fuel for those '' flaming brains " of his; took 
life at the flood. When ashes succeeded the blaze 
and the tide ran low and the mud-fiats shimmered 
in the mocking sunshine; why, he could at least be 
frank. Each in turn he accepted life's promises; 
when it broke some of them — as it sometimes must 
in order to keep the others — he closely examined the 
pieces, whatever the pang. One promise, however, 
would never have failed him: " There are only three 
good things in this world: one is to read, one is to 
write, the other is to live poetry." The last is by 
far the most difficult, and Mrs. Grundy is not un- 
charmed to discover that not all the poets are mas- 



40 Rupert Brooke and the 

ters of the art. But there it is: they are his own 
words; and he meant what he said. 

What, if he had Hved, he would have done in this 
world is a fascinating but an unanswerable question. 
This only can be said: that he would have gone on 
being his wonderful self. Radium is inexhaustible. 
As we look back across the gulf of these last four 
years we see him in vividest outline against the 
gloom. Other poets, beloved of the gods, and not 
unendeared to humanity, have died young, as did 
he. Indeed it may be that, however uncompromis- 
ing the usages of age, every poet, every man in 
whom burns on a few coals of imagination, " dies 
young.'' But no other English poet of his age has 
given up his life at a moment so signal, so pregnant. 
That has isolated and set Rupert Brooke apart. No 
single consciousness can even so much as vaguely 
realise the sacrifice of mind and hope and aspiration, 
of life and promise, " lovely and of good report " 
which this pitiless and abominable war has meant 
to England and to the world. His sacrifice was 
representative. The " incantation of his verse " 
quickened " a new birth," his words were " sparks 
among mankind." 

What place in English literature the caprices of 
time and taste will at length accord him does not 



Intellectual Imagination 41 



concern us. Let us in our thoughts be as charitable 
as we can to our posterity, who will have leisure 
for judgment, and can confer that remembrance 
which fleeting humanity flatters in the term '' im- 
nxortality." 

I saw him beat the surges under him, 

And ride upon their backs . . . 

His bold head 
'Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar'd 
Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke 
To the shore, that o'er his wave-worn basis bow'd. 
As stooping to relieve him. I not doubt 
He came alive to land. 




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